Misbegotten Rules of Web Design

In our concern to help amateur designers to avoid
making the worst web design mistakes, we forge and
promulgate a body of rules--those familiar lists of
Dos and Don'ts that we find in countless texts on
"good" web design.

Experienced designers have no use for these
injunctions. But irrelevance to design practice
is not the worst of it. Rule-making for web design
is insidious. It encourages the notion that one can
do an acceptable design without wrestling with the
difficult questions raised by the total context in
which a site exists. Judging sites by our rules is
to participate in the same mystification.

If we, who throw ourselves up as experts, are truly
concerned with the quality of web design, then we
should judge sites by the principles that experienced
designers use. And if we are really concerned with
educating amateur designers to do good design on the
web, then we should teach them design...not give
them lists of silly rules.